1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and an apparatus for formatting a document in accordance with the structure of the document.
2. Description of the Background Art
Recently, there has been remarkable progress in so-called desk-top publishing as well as in Japanese word-processors, in addition to the advances in the output devices such as displays and printers which make it possible to produce documents in much more diverse and effective styles.
However, producing documents which are both neat-looking and easily-readable requires thorough understanding of operations, commands and formats of a document formatting apparatus to be used, which makes such a document formatting apparatus almost inaccessible to those without formal training.
As a solution to this situation, progress has been made in developing an automatic document formatting system which utilizes an automatically extracted logical structure of a document, along with a document formatting system capable of arranging figures and articles according to automatically derived referential relationships between figures and articles.
Although such logical structures and referential relationships are generally sufficient to provides structural information on the document necessary for effective formatting, ambiguities involved in human languages may lead to misapprehension of the logical structures and referential relationships. Furthermore, apart from this problem, outputs of such automatic document formatting apparatus may not satisfy personal or temporal demands of a user.
On the other hand, there are document formatting systems which utilize command codes indicating the manner of formatting to be embedded in the document, such as `Roff`. More recently, there appeared document formatting systems such as `Scribe` or `T.sub.E X` which use document data and format data independently so a change in command codes can be made at once on the format data, without looking for every embedded command code as in `Roff`. Moreover, `Scribe` and `T.sub.E X` are capable of performing more sophisticated formatting than others. But, in these document formatting systems, a thorough understanding of command codes is indispensable for skillful maneuvering. Furthermore, even in `Scribe` and `T.sub.E X`, embedding of command codes is necessary which can easily be tedious. Although automatic document formatting apparatuses mentioned above are free of such problems concerning command codes, they are, as described above, prone to misapprehension of the logical structures and referential relationships due to the ambiguities in the human languages, and the outputs of such automatic document formatting apparatus may not satisfy personal or temporal demands of a user.
Thus, with conventional document formatting apparatuses, either a possibility of misapprehension resulting from automatic extraction of document structures or else difficulties in dealing with command codes which need to be embedded in the document and thoroughly mastered by the user, have to be tolerated.